When Chef Robert Bennett was young, his father, a chemist, would make Yule logs for friends and neighbors by adding chemicals to the logs to make them burn with brightly colored flames.

With Christmas fast approaching, Classic Cake, for which Bennett is the head chef, is making approximately 100 Yule logs per day. Not the colorful, fiery kind, though. The decadent chocolate cake kind.

Bennett attributes his career path to growing up around his father’s work in chemistry and his own sweet tooth.

“I love chemistry and precision,” he said. “I was destined to do pastry.”

This month, Bennett celebrates his 10th anniversary with Classic Cake. In those 10 years, Bennett, who previously was the pastry chef at Le Bec-Fin and opened Miel Patisserie, has helped to revamp the once-struggling company, producing elegant pastries for their Cherry Hill shop, creating personalized wedding cakes and mass-producing cheesecakes sold all over the world.

The cheesecakes, and practically everything else, are made at the Classic Cake factory in Philadelphia by a team of up to 80 people in a 38,000-square-foot space. They produce 5,000 to 7,000 cheesecakes a day, using a long assembly machine that fills a pan in less than a minute.

Luckily, next door there is an industrial dishwasher that spans the room, ready to clean those many cake pans. There also are industrial mixers than can hold enough cake batter to fill 18 pans, and 11 enormous rotating rack ovens.

Classic Cake sells pastries to hotels, caterers, restaurants, casinos, and handles the private-label products for “quite a few companies,” Bennett said.

And Classic Cake strives to make all of the desserts taste as good as they look.

“It makes us unique as a company,” said owner and president Barry Kratchman. “I think we can satisfy a lot of customers’ needs in different ways.”

Kratchman attributes that flexibility to Bennett, both for his ability to scale up recipes, and his artistic skill.

“First and foremost, I’m trained to be a chef,” Bennett said. “I’m not a highly artistic person.”

Kratchman disagreed. “Chef is an expert in many, many fields,” he said, “He’s fantastic with creative things like blown sugar, fondant.”

The key, according to Bennett, is to make something taste good, then make it attractive. “Sometimes I love the most simple things,” he said.

At the factory, a team of decorators work with high-tech machinery – including an ultrasonic cutting machine that can transform a sheet cake into petit four-sized squares in one minute – to make the pastries for Classic Cake. Each person has a specific skill, Bennett said, and works efficiently as part of a team; “It’s like a symphony,” he said. Once they made 75 wedding cakes in one weekend.

Along with the Yule log cakes, another festive favorite for Bennett is gingerbread houses. He shared a couple of pro tips: thatched roofs can be crafted from shredded wheat, and stained-glass windows can be achieved by melting crushed Lifesavers.

“When they give me creative license, that’s when I like to go crazy,” he said.

In 1985, Bennett made the cake for President Reagan’s second inauguration, a massive undertaking topped with a nearly 6-foot-long sugar replica of the U.S. Capitol.

Is it difficult to see his work cut up and eaten?

“Actually, I enjoy it,” he said. By the time a project is done, he is ready to move onto the next thing.

A few years ago, Kratchman and Bennett decided it would be fun to share his talent with their customers, so they created Classic Cake Academy.

“I like to get out and do these paint nights,” Bennett said, “I just love learning new techniques. This is kind of the pastry version.”

One Wednesday each month, people can pay $10 to watch him demonstrate how to make different desserts at the Cherry Hill shop, then taste the treats.

“One of the greatest gifts he can give is to teach other people to do, at least in one aspect, what he does,” Kratchman said. “They get to sit and see Chef Bennett do demos on one of the things he is phenomenal at.”

Many of the customers who packed into the store on Evesham Road for the December demonstration said they have been coming since the classes started.

Josephine Nagelberg schedules her life around it, she said. “Anything he makes is wonderful.”

Nagelberg has learned some key lessons from the demos, she said, such as the importance of following a recipe with precision. She didn’t used to be so careful when she cooked, she said, but, “Now I take time to follow exactly the recipe.”

The group watches the demonstration, listening to Bennett's stories and asking questions, “and the best of it,” Nagelberg said, “we taste everything.”

It is kind of like a cooking show come to life, “except he gives you more technique than the cooking shows do,” said Amy Kaplan, another longtime attendee.

Bennett had just done her daughter’s wedding cake, Kaplan said.

“And I just ate her daughter’s wedding cake,” added Marcia Tomar, who was sitting next to Kaplan. It was delicious, they agreed, a white cake with chocolate fudge and buttercream icing.

But the most important feature of the cake was that it was pareve, a dairy-free kosher cake, as it was for a Jewish wedding.

“He is an expert at creating non-dairy desserts that taste like the real thing,” Kaplan said.

The No. 1 goal at Classic Cake, Kratchman said, is to provide their customers with an exceptional product. As the company goes forward, they would like to expand into gluten-free desserts.

As for Bennett, he would like to expand the chocolate-making, and would love to open a shop in Center City Philadelphia.

“We’re always striving to take the company new places,” Kratchman said.

Shannon Eblen; (856) 486-2475; SEblen@gannettnj.com

Classic Cake is at 480 Evesham Road in Cherry Hill.  For more information, call (856) 751-5448 or visit classiccake.com

Here are some recipes provided by Chef Robert Bennett:

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour a 9-inch Bundt pan. Peel, core and chop apples into chunks. Toss with cinnamon and sugar and set aside.

Stir together flour, baking powder and salt in a large mixing bowl. In a separate bowl, whisk together oil, orange juice, sugar and vanilla. Mix wet ingredients into the dry ones, then add eggs, one at a time. Scrape down the bowl to ensure all ingredients are incorporated.

Pour half of batter into prepared pan. Spread half of apples over it. Pour the remaining batter over the apples and arrange the remaining apples on top. Bake for about 1½ hours, or until a skewer comes out clean.

Cut cold butter or margarine and cream cheese into bits. In food processor, pulse flour, salt, butter or margarine, cream cheese and sour cream until crumbly.

 Shape crumbly mixture into four equal disks. Wrap each disk and chill 2 hours or up to 2 days.

Roll each disk into a 9-inch round, keeping other disks chilled until ready to roll them.

Combine sugar, cinnamon, chopped walnuts, and finely chopped raisins (may substitute miniature chocolate chips for raisins). 

Roll each disk into a 9 inch round keeping other disks chilled until ready to roll them. Sprinkle round with sugar/nut mixture. Press lightly into dough. With chefs knife or pizza cutter, cut each round into 12 wedges. Roll wedges from wide to narrow, you will end up with point on outside of cookie. Place on ungreased baking sheets and chill rugelach 20 minutes before baking.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F (180 degrees C).

After rugelach are chilled, bake them in the center rack of your oven 22 minutes until lightly golden. Cool on wire racks. Store in airtight containers...they freeze very well.

Variations: Before putting the filling on the dough, use a pastry brush to layer apricot jam as well as brown sugar. Then add the recommended filling. You may also make a mixture of cinnamon and sugar and roll the rugelach in this prior to putting them on the cookie sheets.